robotthepirate wrote:CG don't like that though as it's their space to sell.

The Wiki says that PW ads are "tolerated" (source), and I know of at least one high-profile CG site (Cat Nine: Take Two) that has its own PW ads. So, I don't think it's clear that running your own PW ads is a problem.

As an aside, I'm considering adding PW to The Webcomic Police this week. I read something that makes sense, which is that ads and advertising go hand-in-hand because ads give you more money for advertising, which, in turn, increases your page views and makes your ad space more valuable, increasing the money you earn and can put into advertising, and so on and so on.

robotthepirate wrote:Would it be worth designing ads specific to certain sites (or at least types of sites)? So if you have a comic audience you'd like to target (because you think people who like that comic will like yours or something) you could make an ad to appeal more to them.

I think it'd be worth trying, at least on a trial-and-error basis. PW lets you view the individual performance of each ad, so you could use different ads and see if any perform particularly well. You also have more room to be creative with the larger ads, but they're also a lot more expensive, so you need to be careful with them or you can blow through your budget quickly.

robotthepirate wrote:Also I imagine it'll be worth working out a bit of a crop rotation system of which sites to target. Like Cuddly found, if your ad appears on the same site too often all the people who are likely to have clicked it will have done so already. That said it'd be good to return to high yield sites after a while to attract the attention of new readers and also to reattract people who a) read a bit of your work then forgot about it or b) were too busy to click it last time.

Right. PW manual bids have a default expiration of 30 days, though, which is probably a good amount of time anyways, especially if you're okay with being conservative by setting a low bid. (Remember that Derelict skyscraper I bid $0.70 on? I've seen it get as low as around $0.10, and now it's up to $1.40. So, there seems to be a lot of variance.)

robotthepirate wrote:This all seems to suggest quite a lot of research into who you're advertising with, I wonder how effective it would be to advertise on these sites by other means instead of PW. So if Cuddly's going to hunt down other costume drama comics (ok, technically not a logical description) would she get more views/advertising by doing fan art or connecting with the author in some way on deviantArt? Find and befriend rather than find and bid. Obviously that takes a lot more work to do so it's a question of free time vs cost.

Art's generally pretty terrible when it comes to value. If you're after efficiency, you'd probably do better mowing lawns or something and putting the money into ads than by spending that same amount of time working on a cool drawing. That said, fan art should primarily be done for personal enjoyment and as a gift to the creator, with any page views coming as a pleasant side effect. Same thing with connections -- it's fun and informative to talk to people you have a common interest in.

"Seems like the only comics that would be good to this person are super action crazy lines, mega poses!"

robotthepirate wrote: So if Cuddly's going to hunt down other costume drama comics (ok, technically not a logical description) would she get more views/advertising by doing fan art or connecting with the author in some way on deviantArt? Find and befriend rather than find and bid.

I suspect that deviantArt is a pretty poor way to gain a following for your comic (or any other project), from my experience on there, the most popular stuff is fan art for established fandoms or bizzare fetishes and it is very hard to find much in the way of original projects.

Deviantart~tumblr"Your service is to the story and to the characters. Fuck the audience and fuck your own whims." - Yeahduff

RobboAKAscooby wrote:I suspect that deviantArt is a pretty poor way to gain a following for your comic (or any other project), from my experience on there, the most popular stuff is fan art for established fandoms or bizzare fetishes and it is very hard to find much in the way of original projects.

I guess the potential's there just 'cause dA gets so much traffic, but networking and commenting on stuff seems a little time-consuming, especially if your work isn't really that attention-grabbing.

A li'l update on the PW campaign: 42% spent and it's at $0.036 CPC. So far, that's better than my previous two attempts, and excluding a bad Saturday brings the CPC down to $0.031. Europe's also beating U.S. significantly, with a $0.028 CPC vs. a $0.048 CPC, respectively.

"Seems like the only comics that would be good to this person are super action crazy lines, mega poses!"

It's funny to me how traffic always dips on the weekends. I would have thought that weekend=more free time=spend time on internet, but it seems like people actually use their free weekends to go outside or probably play video games. Whereas people read comics on weekdays because they're at work and in front of a computer anyway or just got home from work/school and need something mindless to do to unwind.

VeryCuddlyCornpone wrote:It's funny to me how traffic always dips on the weekends. I would have thought that weekend=more free time=spend time on internet, but it seems like people actually use their free weekends to go outside or probably play video games. Whereas people read comics on weekdays because they're at work and in front of a computer anyway or just got home from work/school and need something mindless to do to unwind.

I've always agreed with that theory. It feels like, though, that whenever the topic comes up, someone says that they get the most traffic on weekends, or that they mostly read webcomics on weekends, so it's never been entirely clear.

It's also only one Saturday, so who knows. I'll have to see what happens this weekend. PW lets you exclude certain days from your campaign, so only running ads Monday through Friday could be a viable strategy.

"Seems like the only comics that would be good to this person are super action crazy lines, mega poses!"

I guess most webcomics update during the week. I regularly forget this and am disappointed to find no new updates. Actually I just tend to check all my webcomics for updates every day because: 1) I forget when they update 2) they update late sometimes and I forget if they updated on the correct day or not 3) the updates are so sporadic I turn up purely through hope. In the week I'll usually go through them all but at the weekend (if I remember it's weekend) I only check the few I have that update on Saturdays, I don't think I have any that update on Sundays. Sometimes on Saturday I'll check to see if I missed any Friday updates but by the time I get to Sunday I'm usually pretty sure there isn't going to be anything new, unless one of the Saturday updaters didn't update.

In other words: if people think like me, which hopefully they don't, the day you're least likely to get clicked is a Sunday.

This whole thing makes me sound very forgetful. Though that is a fair observation.

robotthepirate wrote:I guess most webcomics update during the week. I regularly forget this and am disappointed to find no new updates. Actually I just tend to check all my webcomics for updates every day because: 1) I forget when they update 2) they update late sometimes and I forget if they updated on the correct day or not 3) the updates are so sporadic I turn up purely through hope. In the week I'll usually go through them all but at the weekend (if I remember it's weekend) I only check the few I have that update on Saturdays, I don't think I have any that update on Sundays. Sometimes on Saturday I'll check to see if I missed any Friday updates but by the time I get to Sunday I'm usually pretty sure there isn't going to be anything new, unless one of the Saturday updaters didn't update.

You might wanna try making bookmarks for 'em and organizing them in folders based on their update schedules. Or, you could make an organized links page on your site and use that as your bookmarks (which I what I used to do back in the day). But yeah, I agree that it's really easy to get distracted from Internet Stuff on the weekends. When someone's bored at school or work, it's pretty tempting to check out webcomics.

robotthepirate wrote:In other words: if people think like me, which hopefully they don't, the day you're least likely to get clicked is a Sunday.

My campaign still has a few cents left in it, but when it's done, I'll include a day-by-day breakdown. Based on the results I've seen, I expect that Saturday will be the worst and that Sunday might actually be the best, which is kind of confusing. I have another experiment running now, though, which should be active this weekend, so I'll get some more results from that.

"Seems like the only comics that would be good to this person are super action crazy lines, mega poses!"

LibertyCabbage wrote:You might wanna try making bookmarks for 'em and organizing them in folders based on their update schedules.

I used to do that. Several computers ago. Now I'm just like "whatever", I figure I'm boosting everyones sats, making them feel better about their readership and putting them a little higher on Google (actually I've just realised I have no idea how Google decides who's on top, is it based on traffic or something else?). I guess making the list online would solve the issue of losing comic when I need a new computer but I've always considered the rebuilding of webcomic lists to be a purifying process, those that aren't important enough to me don't survive to the new computer.

Now I have time to promote my comic all I need is a comic. Really should upload S-C, it was suposed to start running on Monday.

Does anyone know anything about Google AdSense? I'm currently using Google Blogger as a news feed for my site and it suggests I can make money by putting ads on my blog through AdSense. I doubt anyone looks at my blog (certainly no one follows it) but it might be worth bearing in mind for the future.

I'm still not sure about adding PW, there's never been a clear yes or no on the subject.

I tried to apply as a publisher and I got rejected, they gave this really vague statement "does not comply with Google policies" which could mean anything! As far as I can tell, I'm not doing anything illegal nor am I cheating my visitors, so I wish they could be more specific instead of just sending an automated message. I'll try again later, but it seems really difficult to get approved, at least in my case. @_@

robotthepirate wrote:(actually I've just realised I have no idea how Google decides who's on top, is it based on traffic or something else?).

I think it's a cross between traffic and relevancy, with the latter probably being based on the site's metadata and how frequently the searched phrase comes up. Search engine optimization's complicated, though, and I doubt that Google would reveal exactly how their process works.

robotthepirate wrote:Does anyone know anything about Google AdSense?

It seems that AdSense is pay-per-click. It might be something worth looking into as an alternative to Project Wonderful's pay-per-day model. I know that PW takes a 10 percent cut if you want to withdraw funds, but I don't know what Google's cut is. I think it's pretty convenient that PW revenue can go 100 percent into PW advertising.

robotthepirate wrote:I'm still not sure about adding PW, there's never been a clear yes or no on the subject.

You could always PM an admin about it. Hopefully one of them responds, and, if not, then at least you tried to contact someone.

Humbug wrote:I tried to apply as a publisher and I got rejected, they gave this really vague statement "does not comply with Google policies" which could mean anything!

There doesn't seem to be a lot of information on how AdSense works.

"Seems like the only comics that would be good to this person are super action crazy lines, mega poses!"

Conclusion: While European traffic got somewhat better results than American traffic, the overall CPC of $0.04 was higher than I was hoping for. The best day of the week to bid was clearly Thursday, as even with a terrible June 6 it managed to keep up with strong days like Sunday and Wednesday. When June 6 is excluded, Thursday's CPC drops all the way to $0.022. While Friday had a good day on May 24, it's clear that Friday and Saturday are weak days that should be avoided. As far as individual websites go, there's no obvious common element here, although Quantum Vibe had good results for the second experiment in a row.

"Seems like the only comics that would be good to this person are super action crazy lines, mega poses!"

Conclusion: Europe continued to have solid results, and Canada was boosted by the excellent performance of the Quantum Vibe button ad. The ad, with a maximum bid of only $0.02 a day, got 22 clicks for $0.09, which is a CPC of $0.004. Leftover Soup's Elsewhere leaderboard ad is another standout. Also with a $0.02 maximum bid, it got 4 clicks on the final day of bidding for $0.007, totaling just under a $0.002 CPC.

Conclusion: I created a leaderboard ad featuring President Obama on June 11, and it had a 0.55% click-through-rate that day compared to only 0.17% for the skyscraper ad. All of the ads had a similar CPC, though, with the exception of the overpriced rectangle ads, more than half of which never ran because they were always outbid.

Conclusion: I saw that Quantum Vibe, Leftover Soup, and Selkie had great results in my previous experiments, so I focused my attention on them this time and was rewarded for it. While both Selkie and Grrl Power had maximum bids of $0.20, I often saw them drop to below the $0.10 mark, which played a big role in getting their CPCs to a low amount. It's worth noting that ads below $0.10 have more potential for value because they go by penny increments instead of dime increments. As for Skin Horse, I was searching for an anti-government webcomic like Quantum Vibe to bid on, and Skin Horse came up because it has the words "government conspiracy" in its search tags.

Conclusion: I saw an ad for Decrypting Rita at the top of Comic Genesis, and I figured I'd "piggyback" off the impending clicks and take advantage of the dirt-cheap ad space. It certainly paid off, as the webcomic spiked to 37 times its normal traffic during the period that I was the high bidder. Wayward Sons, I am ARG!, and Exiern all had bargains for their non-American traffic.

Conclusion: I bid on Stupid Snake because I got some clicks from its European traffic in my previous experiment, but its $0.02 minimum American bid ended up not being worth it. However, this area was a big success because the five worst bids were all for small amounts. In total, they only made up 2.8 percent of my budget, compared to the 25 percent my worst five cost the previous time I tried manual bidding.

Overall: This was definitely my most successful experiment, as I was able to focus on a few reliable sites while avoiding expensive money-sinks. All five of my bids with the most clicks came in at under $0.02 CPC, and those five accounted for 56.3 percent of my clicks while costing 45.4 percent of my budget. I also paid more attention to my bids this time, and I increased my low-CPC bids while decreasing my high-CPC bids. Lastly, by avoiding placing maximum bids of more than $0.30, I was able to spread out my budget over a longer period of time, which allowed me to get additional value from low-CPC bids.

"Seems like the only comics that would be good to this person are super action crazy lines, mega poses!"

I've been messing around a little in-between experiments and have managed to get 132 clicks for $0.27, which gives a ridiculous CPC of $0.002. The trick is setting penny bids for 30 days on just a few sites and letting PW do its thing. Your ad might get outbid 80 percent of the time, but you don't get charged for that, and then the 20 percent of the time it's up you're getting a great deal as long as you can get at least one click. It also sometimes gives free bids if the competition's low, which is nice since normally $0 bids have a two-day maximum. The downside of this strategy is that it's slow, and you might only get 15 to 20 clicks a day doing it if you bid very conservatively.

"Seems like the only comics that would be good to this person are super action crazy lines, mega poses!"

Been doing some more messing around with some new ads (well, one new ad, one other ad I've already used in the past) on PW. I have a campaign running and then two manual bids on general SmackJeeves ad slots. Unfortunately I think the SmackJeeves ads actually appear on a rotating basis, instead of one high bidder having the roost for however many hours, you have multiple high bidders that can get displayed. Not sure I'd bid on those slots again. I'm disenchanted with the way rectangle ads perform, at least in my experience. When finding sites to bid on with a rectangle ad, there's a lot of sites that Project Wonderful reports get a lot of pageviews for that ad, but when I go to take a look at the page to see where the ad appears, most people have their rectangle adboxes all the way at the bottom of the page or buried between comment/blog entries under the comic. Just doesn't seem like something readers would actually get to looking at, let alone click.

Hoping to create some ads of other sizes. I saw decent success with my banner ad months ago, but I'm tired of looking at that one myself (same banner as in my sig here) so I want to make up something new before I advertise with that size again.

Yeah, I think a big reason why buttons, banners, and leaderboards have been more successful in my tests is that it's easy for people to fit them in at the top right by the comic page, which means the ad actually gets noticed by a lot more people. A leaderboard at the top and a rectangle at the bottom will have the same pageview numbers, but the more prominent one should get more clicks. And it's just harder to fit a rectangle into the main part of the layout.

As for Smack Jeeves, the site rotates the PW ad with ads from other services, such as AdChoices, so it's not as effective as it could be. However, I assume that the pageview numbers are still accurate, so I would base bidding amounts on what it says on Project Wonderful rather than some general idea that SJ gets a lot of traffic.

Anyways, my current campaign's going well, as I've been getting about a $0.007 CPC. That's with getting about 50% more clicks than unique clicks for some reason, but even going by unique clicks it's still pretty good value. My trick has been raising the minimum page views while keeping the max bid low, and while it's a relatively slow method, it does a good job of finding deals that I wouldn't have noticed otherwise (or don't want to spend a lot of time hunting for). Another trick is only running ads Sunday through Thursday, since I've consistently gotten bad results on weekends. My current settings are for leaderboard in 2K+ pageviews in any region and a $0.04 max bid, and I'll probably try something next week like 5K+ page views with a $0.05 max bid just to see how far I can push it.

"Seems like the only comics that would be good to this person are super action crazy lines, mega poses!"

I'm looking into advertising with PW. I'm not ready just yet but I'm looking into it. Part of that involves looking at having them advertise on my page. PrintScreened my site to look at what space I have to play with but now I'm wondering how quickly the advertising will come to dominate the page if I let it.

To investigate this I went through my comic list to see what other people did. So here are the results:19 comics were in the study. A total of 50 ads were on display. The Mean number of ads is therefore 2.63. The median and mode number were both 2 with 8 of the 19 comics have 2 ads on their page. 2 sites had none. 1 site had 8 though this was down to it having 5 square ads in a row (mostly unused). Ignoring this one the highest 2 had 5 ads.

The most common ads were Leaderboards, 14 websites displayed these. 3 displayed 2. Usually these were at the top of the page, if a second was present these were usually at the bottom of the page. Of the 5 pages with didn't have a Leaderboard 2 had no ads whatsoever and 2 others had Banners in their place.Next most common were skyscrapers with 10 websites displaying them. 2 had 2. Usually these were either at the side of either the comic or the accompanying blog or both. Which side of the page skyscrapers occurred was another thing I was interested in. 7 of the 10 sites had them on the right of the page and the remaining 3 on the left.

I saw no Buttons at all.

***Personal observations:Sites seemed quite crowded when there were lots of ads down one side (Skyscrapers and Squares usually). I personally preferred having them to the right of the comic/blog because it kept the websites focus on the author's work. Leaderboards and Banners seem fairly unobtrusive since we've come to expect them in this day and age (remember when ads were annoying). Smaller ads, because there were usually more of them, seemed cluttering and ineffective at drawing me to them.

I would say 3 is a good limit but there are some ads that I'm not counting. Having a Leaderboard at the bottom of your page for example is pretty harmless but I imagine it would also generate little income as it is unlikely to be seen. I'm not counting the newsbox I have either.Of course CG already has a Leaderboard at at the top of my page which leaves me with 2 spots, a Skyscraper seem a good choice and as my own rules deny me a second I think a Rectangle would be good.

Smaller ads, because there were usually more of them, seemed cluttering and ineffective at drawing me to them.

They have their place, though, because they're a lot cheaper than leaderboard ads. A great example is Girl Genius, which currently has its American leaderboard at $102.00 while its American banners are at $0.20. They're essentially low-risk, low-reward. Although, I've gotten more interested in larger ads lately because of the greater potential for high click-through rates.

I would say 3 is a good limit but there are some ads that I'm not counting. Having a Leaderboard at the bottom of your page for example is pretty harmless but I imagine it would also generate little income as it is unlikely to be seen. I'm not counting the newsbox I have either.Of course CG already has a Leaderboard at at the top of my page which leaves me with 2 spots, a Skyscraper seem a good choice and as my own rules deny me a second I think a Rectangle would be good.

Well, the unfortunate reality of the situation's that you'd probably only be making about $0.01 a day, so strategically maximizing your profit isn't really going to matter. Even if you can get it up to $0.02 a day, the extra $0.30 a month or so you'd get out of it isn't really significant by any means. I expect that increasing your page views would have a much more noticeable effect on your income than having an ideal ad setup. That said, I've experimented with a few setups, including four buttons, six buttons, one half-banner, two half-banners, and my current setup of one half-banner with two buttons, and it hasn't made a noticeable difference.

Also:

me wrote:I'll probably try something next week like 5K+ page views with a $0.05 max bid just to see how far I can push it.

I tried this for a couple days, and PW's bidding $0.05 on spots that aren't even getting close to 5K a day. I think what's happening is that aren't any 5K ads for that cheap, so PW's automatically lowering my criteria, which is kinda B.S. I had the best results with 1K at $0.03 and 2K at $0.04, so I'll try it with 2.5K, 3K, or 4K and see how that goes. $0.10 for 5K would be interesting to try sometime, though, as $0.10 is the top of the lower tier.

"Seems like the only comics that would be good to this person are super action crazy lines, mega poses!"